Imperial geographies and topographies of nihilism

Abstract

In this first piece, Eduardo Mendieta considers the relationship between empires, cities and war. It focuses particularly on the emergence of geopolitics as science at the service of empire building and the 20th‐century escalation to total war against cities. The focus, however, is not on European empires, but the American empire, which since the 19th century has developed its own type of geopolitics and means of waging war. Mendieta discusses strategic fire bombing of the Second World War, the implementation of suburbanization policies in the USA after the War, and the recent use of economic sanctions aimed at crippling cities, as in the most recent case, Baghdad. In tandem, he discusses the complicity of world‐historical and ontologizing philosophical perspectives that see wars as conflagrations between forces and fates, leading to the trivialization and exculpation of the devastation of cities and extermination of humans.